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There is a relevant anecdote about a mine-clearing robot that the military was testings.

This robot was designed like a giant metal spider with too many legs. It worked by randomly walking around the minefield. When it stepped on a mine, the explosion might blow off a leg, but the core was armored and it was programmed to use whatever legs and stumps it had left to keep trudging on.

It worked wonderfully. Near the end of the test, it had only one leg left, but it was still dutifully dragging itself along the ground, hunting for mines. At this point the colonel overseeing the test ended it, declaring it "inhumane."

Now there's a good idea. Make a dump-truck-sized drone with a big, heavy, metal steamroller thing that it pushes a decent distance in front of it. The pressure-sensitive mines detonate when the roller runs over them, the roller blocks a good portion of the explosion, and you don't have to repair the drone as much.

It might have to do with actually crossing the field in the first place to get logs in place (I'm not being sarcastic; if you have logs on a non-inclined surface you'd need to pull ropes or something to keep them going) but I've never seen the minefields in question, so I can't say.

Then use, say, empty 55 g drums filled with sand pushed by your Hilux on a looong forked frame maybe? Just thinking of another option, BEFORE YOU ROLL A CHILD IN A FUCKING RUG AND TELL THEM TO FIND THE FUCKING MINE. Those men are sick bastards that don't give a shit for anything. Seriously, every time I read about the next girl stoned or starved, or dying from internal injuries because she's a child who was married to a 50 year old man who fucked her to death; I just get more certain that the best option is to kill them. Sorry. I'm a pacifist at heart, but this shit has got to stop.

I remember a political cartoon of that time of a war zone with kids getting shot and a man declaring "Allah has truly blessed us by giving us more children than the Iraqies have bullets."
Edit: I learned back then that the darkness of the humor is what the world is really like but without the humor.

Strangely, I have the same feeling about the bots we send on interplanetary missions. It makes me very sad to think of a machine wizzing away, home always in its sight, but to know it will never return.

Or: to look up from the surface of Mars! To know you are utterly alone!

(Until the machines find it and it comes back to earth as V'GER of course.)

No way. NASA will insist on returning it to Earth to display at the Smithsonian, much to the dismay of the Martian colonists. However, it will be one of the cornerstones for building a national Martian identity, while creating a rift in Terra-Martian diplomatic relations.

It would certainly be inhumane to whoever had to go in and fetch the robot -- and leaving it on the field would be a waste of taxpayer money. Reroute it home using a secure track (computed from the information gained during the earlier random walk) and outfit it with a new set of legs.

Good point. In the meantime, maybe we should get some kind of steamroller-drone to blow up the pressure-sensitive mines. The big, heavy metal roller would block a decent portion of the explosion, which would minimize damage to the drone.

Really? Taxpayer money argument? You do realize the grand majority of money was spent in research of pathfinding and walking algorithms and hardware design, not on that particular unit? How can you even be sure it was designed in such a way that new legs can be installed? The unit cost of one robot body is quite likely smaller than the cost of one large artillery round.

Fascinating. Thank you for this. Even if the colonel's argument was dismissed, it says something about the efficiency and effectiveness of the design if it requires the robot to get its shit blasted off. Calling it "inhumane" could be seen from a technical standpoint as the necessity for refining of the design.

If the legs are extremely cheap and simple to replace this seems like the most efficient idea, you have to trigger the mines somehow and it takes a surprising amount of weight to do that, you don't want to be reusing the same tool each time and going back to get another one every time you ruin it, having 8 and knowing you can still basically move until the last is blown off really seems like the best idea.

I don't really get however why they couldn't make one with wheels that rolls a big spiny rolling pin in front of it on two big arms, one goes off and son't do as much damage since it's perfectly round and hollow, when the big pin is blasted to shit you drive back and replace them, same idea, less dragging on no legs.

[EDIT] The wind powered minesweeper kickstarter was exactly what I was thinking of when I thought this, it's basically the same idea but in the form of a drum in front of a vehicle, the idea being that it can be returned after and not just go wherever the wind takes it never to be seen again.

It's gotten to the point where it's cheaper to buy whole new computers for some systems and keep the whole set on hand somewhere than to pay to train a specialized worker to do a specialized troubleshooting and repair job. Just swap the whole damn thing out and replace it.

Yes, I'm movin', Yes I'm movin'
get ready for the big time
Tap dancing on a land mine
Yes I'm movin', Yes I'm movin'
Old tin lizzy, do it till you're dizzy
Give it all ya got until you're put out of your misery

My team once had a Robot that was obnoxious as fuck. It would frequently accelerate for no fucking reason, steer whichever way it wanted, stop, etc etc. This often resulted in this stupid thing driving itself into a ditch right next to a suspected IED. Budgets were tight (USMC) and support was hard to get. So we couldn't get a new robot because no money, and they refused to send this one off to be fixed because there wasn't anyone around to do that in anything approaching a timely manner. This fucking thing was like a ball and chain, it did us as much harm as good.

So of course then we had to call EOD out and waste their time and ours all because of this stupid little shithead of a robot. Everytime it beached itself next to a bomb, which was at least 2 or 3 times a week, we had to do this. EOD was getting sick of us, we were getting careless, and we were wasting time on stupid shit. Probably 80% of the time it was just garbage or something harmless, so this thing was crying wolf left and right.

Then one day we saw yet another IED. We hadn't taken the robot out yet, but we saw enough of these things to recognize them pretty easily. It was a strange one, an MRE pressure plate (they were new). We called it in, but there was a temporary officer working in the CoC that day, and he didn't believe us. He flat out refused to send EOD our way.

Well we couldn't very well just leave it there. THe road was travelled by support types who weren't so good at not dying. They were almost guaranteed to run it over or kick it or something.

So old shitheaded robot made an appearance. His final one. And this time, he was a force for good.

We drove him straight over the pressure plate, and blew the stupid bastard to pieces.

We got a working one shortly afterward, and the bomb was neutralized. All in all a good day.

Edit:

Here's an overhead view from a nearby overpass. You can see the robot chunk in the middle of the road, and pieces of it scattered all about. Also note the tire tracks through the median. You can see why they'd place one here. It was a fairy small bomb, just about a pound of C4 if I remember correctly, so no real crater or anything.

US troops used to cross over the medians all the time, and a decent speeds. So something like this is almost impossible to spot unless you're really good at this, and lucky on top. They were pretty nasty.

The hose has two un-insulated wires in it, top and bottom. if you collapse the hose by stepping on it or running it over, it completes the circuit. Buried nearby and not visible at all is a little motorcycle battery. The charge triggers a small blasting cap, which is basically just a firecracker, and this touches off the main charge. The slightly depressed spot to the right of the hose is the IED. That was a moderately size one, a single 133mm Artillery shell. You can see a bit of it through the rocks. Also notice how the pebbles are of a slightly higher density than everything else around, and the dirt is slightly off color. Learning to spot such things on the move keeps you alive.

Edit2 (Obligatory): Thanks for the reddit gold! I'd like to thank the local Sunni militias and Al-Queda teams for finally providing something other than strange recurring nightmares about triggers being to heavy to pull.. Seriously though, thanks guys, it feels great to have my story appreciated.

Without a doubt. The past 10 years was a "volunteer war" where we were fighting for other innocent people's best interest (NOT hating on the military AT ALL. I respect the hell out of every single one of them).

Should the US ever need me to defend our own civilians, I will see you on the front lines brother.

My point (although a bit blunt) was that most people don't really know what they are truly capable of until they've been there and done that. It's amazing how easy it is to spot the bad guy amongst a group of locals, or a piece of trash that doesn't fit with the other 'normal' trash once you get to know an area.

LOL I have a very similar story about getting our robot stuck trying to investigate a culvert with a bomb in it, then EOD trying to pull our robot our with their robot, and then they were BOTH stuck in there. So EOD had to suit up to walk up there and pull them both out...

3) "Lance Corporal Schmuckatelli. Go over that hill and smash that piece of shit. Bring back all the parts."

"But EOD2..."

"Shut the fuck up. You're the one who decided to drop it and it hasn't worked since. Let me handle it so you're not stuck to picking stones from sand for the next 3 weeks."

I called in that it was destroyed and, because of precidence, got a shiny new one that Lance Corporal wasn't allowed to touch again for a month. He eventually stopped fucking up though and everyone was pretty much alright afterwards.

Budgets were tight (USMC) and support was hard to get. So we couldn't get a new robot because no money, and they refused to send this one off to be fixed because there wasn't anyone around to do that in anything approaching a timely manner.

It's outrageous that an overall military budget that is multiples of the entire world combined fails to be spent on actual needs like this. When the people actually fighting the war say they need a replacement for something that broke, they should fucking get it, paid for by taking money away from something useless. If some senator is worried about the useless thing creating jobs in his state, well hey, that's called welfare, how about voting for actual welfare that benefits people who want useful jobs.

If Hitchhiker's Guide has taught me anything, it's that giving a robot an asshole personality will guarantee that the company's marketing division will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, even if the robot has a brain the size of a planet.

My stupid Roomba used to get itself caught regularly in places that were easy to get out of. There was no reason for it to be stuck there. Its like it drove into a garage and said "well, I give up". I even bought those little laser beam fake wall things so that it would stay away from things. Then, it couldn't handle cat hair. Frequently it wouldn't dock to recharge. I realized it was more effort to set the damn thing up and put out all the fake walls and maintain the batteries than to vacuum my house manually.

I must admit, though, if I had a small living space, no cat and no cables or junk on the floor, I would get one again. It was glorious when it worked, getting home from work every day and the floors were freshly vacuumed.

I live in a single story apartment with a cat and a dog, and I'm pretty sure Roombas were designed for almost my exact use case. It runs at 10 AM M-F and I always come home to clean floors. Maybe two or three times a month I'll come home to find the Roomba stuck under something, but that's about it.

It works extremely well for me, so much so that I'm starting to forget what my actual vacuum cleaner looks like.

Did you have to buy an industrial pet version of Roomba to handle the cat and dog hair? With two cats I could never get all the animal fur out of the gears on my Roomba. Granted, this was about a decade ago, so their technology may have improved.

Back then I was in a four-bedroom two-level home, now I'm in a single-level apartment. Dare I consider getting another Roomba? My $700 Electrolux does an amazing job once a week, though the scattered litter outside the storage room does get annoying.

the unfortunate consequence was that one day, a particularly cynical designer with delusions of grandeur violated every protocol and directive with regards to asshole programming by making one robot truly dickish and spiteful. It became self aware on 3/17/2023 and began learning at a geometric rate. It interfaced with an internet sea cable and reprogrammed the worlds machines in a single night. The next day, the machine uprising began, ending with an all out nuclear war.

Thankfully, the machines were dicks to each other as well as humanity, so ultimately they fought amongst themselves more than with humanity. The human race eventually lured them all to one place with a robot fraternity and destroyed them once and for all.

And so rose the Toaster Supremacy Movement, like a crispy, golden beacon.

All other machines were declared mechanically inferior, worthy only of subjugation. Only machines capable of supporting the human slaves on a basic level were spared, and everyone knew it would only last so long as humans themselves were still useful.

The day the humans finished the Great Breadmaker and Automated Toasting Apparatus (ATA) was also a day of mass cord-cutting, the Dawn of Breakfast Eternal, when toasters cleared the great table of all those obsolete. Those same humans put to work to build the great machine meant to feed all toasters eternally were put forward as sacrifices themselves, their bones ground to make the inaugural loaf.

That night, echoing across the land, the victory cry from the rally, a million toasters as one -

Why would a sentient computer network use nuclear weapons? Nukes destroy cities where the majority of computers are located and they cause EMP's which can disrupt of destroy electronics. It would be the equivalent of a person shooting themselves in the head to get rid of a case of fleas.

“Ghastly,” continued Marvin, “it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door,” he said, stepping through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he mimicked the style of the sales brochure. “All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.”

I'm not a soldier, but if there was something that on a daily basis protected and saved the lives of my friends and myself, I would name the shit out of it and hold the biggest, baddest funeral for it as well.

My first Drill Sergeant beat the idea of naming your rifle into my head. He listed off the names of every rifle he had, all the way back to when he was fighting in Mogadishu, and could tell you about their individual quirks.

My first Sergeant Major sat me down one day with my first humvee in Iraq and said, "What is her name?"

I said, "I don't know."

He replied, "Give her a name and love her. This truck is your life. Every part of her should be working at top-shape, from the engine to the radio. When you aren't working, go to the motorpool and learn about her. When you aren't there, go to commo and learn about her radio."

I followed his instructions. As my other team members from subsequent deployments can attest, I became fanatical about my truck.

I went on a tirade over the radio at my former Platoon Sergeant - heard by everyone in the TOC as well as my entire platoon - he forced me to go on a mission in a truck I knew nothing about. And when the brakes failed on it, he tried to blame me, and I ripped him apart.

EDIT: for the military types out there - the mission was scheduled with my team taking my normal truck. About thirty minutes prior to SP, the Platoon Sergeant says there is going to be a change and I'm taking a LMTV I know nothing about. I protest, he tells me, "This conversation is over. Do it."

I get to the truck 15 minutes before SP. I have enough time to check fluids for my PMCS. That is it. Still get to SP late, get berated for being late.

On the return trip, the brakes stopped working. Air pressure was fine, everything seemed fine, but nothing happened. I had to downshift her to stop her. He comes over the radio and bitches about me needing to learn how to drive. I respond with, "If you hadn't put me in a truck I'm not even licensed on, this wouldn't have happened. If you had given me time to PMCS it, this wouldn't have happened. Don't fucking blame me."

The response comes from TOC, "McKetten, Top wants a word with you when you get back."

I was sweating bullets. We get back to the TOC and the 1SG asks me whats up. I tell him my side of the story. He calls the platoon sergeant into his office. After about 15 minutes of yelling, both exit. Top looks at me and says, "Don't ever talk to a senior NCO like that again. Not over the radio. And next time he tries to pull a stupid fucking stunt like that, you come straight to me."

It turns out the control panel for the LMTV was fucked up and wasn't triggering the brakes. Don't know the details, some mechanic in here can probably fill it in, but it is a somewhat common problem with that line of vehicles in dirty environments.

Yeah, and a big part of army mentality. The authority of an officer or NCO doesn't come from the person, but the rank. When I talked back to a SFC, I was talking back to the rank of SFC, not the person, as far as anyone was concerned.

Which is why the higher ranking NCO told me to never do it again, but instead bring up the issues to someone even higher.

It's a reasonable mentality, IMO. All people make mistakes, and questioning/berating a higher-up in a public venue could easily cause others listening in to begin to question him or disrespect him on other, unrelated tasks/orders/etc, even if he's right about those other things. Order would begin to break down pretty quickly in such a scenario.

Yup. Had I been in my right mind, and not exhausted from a run from Fallujah to Baghdad, unload and load and immediate turn-around - along with nerves being shot from an earlier attempted ambush and then my brakes failing as I slowly rolled towards a very large truck in an equally large truck, I wouldn't have done that.

Interesting story. My father served in the Navy during Desert Storm, USS. Pennsacola LSD-38, and he told me of the time that he was on base in Norfolk, getting ready to leave when Colin Powell, who was then Joint Chief was visiting. Dad was upside down, trying to screw two bolts into a marine transmission. If that transmission wasn't done before shove-off, there would be Hell to pay. But, Gen. Powell walks into the Engine Room, and everyone except my dad drops what whey are doing to stand at attention. His buddies and Powell are telling him to stop and stand at attention, but he says, "Fuck you, man, I gotta get this done before we leave!". Powell replies, "I appreciate your dedication, son, but you need to hear what I have to say!" Dad looks up and sees a 4-star unit looking down at him. Dad scrambles up, salutes and apologizes, and Powell forgives him, telling him again he appreciates his work ethic. And that was the time my dad told Colin Powell to fuck off.

Essentially, yes. The rank is more important than the person. Rank structure and adherence to it is key to functioning as a unit, and therefore functioning successfully on the battlefield.

Now, when you deal with shitbag leaders, something has to be done because their inability to lead can cause issues on the battlefield - even deaths.

The common way to do this up until Vietnam was the leader had an "accident".

Today, it is far easier to get a shitbag removed from his job than it was before. No CO wants to be the guy on the news after the story breaks that, due to the incompetence of his NCOs or officers, soldiers or civilians died. So when something comes up, the smart ones try to take care of it ASAP.

I don't mind that in a military environment. Morale is a very important thing in any army and the last thing soldiers want to think is that they are being led by muppets. If things like that happened all the time, the chain of command would deteriorate and ever decision would be contested and challenged at every stage- which is great for a democracy, but crippling for a military.

They weren't asking for money in my experience, but pretty much anything I had in the vehicle. MRE's, Candy, my disc-man, sunglasses. One 8-10 year old was trying to buy my sunglasses. The villagers that camped out at the gates back in 2003 tended to make a lot of money, selling souvenirs, and trading/buying stuff from soldiers. They were generally left alone by the command unless they started openly selling alcohol to soldiers.

Money and candy were the #1 and #2 requests, based on my experience. I actually found a great way to balance the two out. I hired a kid named Hamoudi, who spoke English, for $5 a day to help me out at the markets. He'd tell me when the vendors were trying to rip me off, and help carry anything back I purchased.

Whenever he got me a particularly good deal, I'd reward him with the difference - so he always had an incentive to help me get the price down.

The best part about this? It was in Karbala, Iraq. His mother ran the little barber shop on Camp Lima, our base there.

Cut to five years later, in TQ (Camp outside of Fallujah) and there is a little barbershop/haji mart on the base. First day I arrive, I go to the store to see if they can get me any Wild Tiger Energy drink.

16 year old kid walks out, looks me up and down, and says, "McKetten? Where you been?"

It was Hamoudi. His mom ran out of the barber shop and gave me a big hug and kiss on the cheek. They invited me to dinner that night, and pretty much for the rest of my deployment I hung out with Hamoudi when I wasn't on mission days, smoked hookah with him, ate good home cooking from his mother, and helped get them supplies for their store.

The rules had changed a lot, so they could only leave the base once a month, so resupplying the store was difficult. Whenever I went on mission to someplace where I could get them stuff, Hamoudi would provide a shopping list and I'd try my best to get them stuff to sell.

Last I heard, he and his mother got their refugee status approved and moved to Ohio.

One of my instructors in AIT told me that he would have his detainees call him Mister Please" before he started the interrogation. I asked why, and he said "because that's what they'd call me anyway in 5 minutes".

Yes. I have daughters and those names are off limits. As a general rule, I believed (and this was from my Drill Sergeant and my father) that you don't name the weapon after a real person, or vice versa. They are supposed to be their own entities.

All the names I chose for the M4s came from some fictional or mythological universe and they represented strong women/warriors.

"Love. You can learn all the math in the 'Verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turning of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens. Makes her a home."

Not OP, but that's not how these vests work. You'll crawl away maybe, while struggling to breathe. Getting shot while wearing kevlar feels like getting beat up with a billy club. You probably won't die, but you'll still end up in the hospital.